LINHA DE FUGA - INTERNATIONAL LABORATORY FOR ARTISTIC CREATION 2020

LINHA DE FUGA is the second edition of an international laboratory that aims to promote encounters between creators, artists and thinkers from different countries, designed as a field of experimentation, learning and sharing of collective knowledge. It takes place between 30 May and 21 June, 2020 in the city of Coimbra through practical creation seminars and collaboration workshops led by invited national and foreign artists who bring and propose different artistic practices to the participating artists.
The laboratory is aimed at arts professionals with a minimum creation path, with no age limit. We are looking for artists who want to expose their processes and interact with critique to their work from peers and the public.
The laboratory brings together 18 participants/creators who must answer this call with a work in process – which may be at different stages of development – and which will be the object of study throughout the Laboratory period or with an action proposal that should consider the construction of the common good in society. In this open call we welcome applications for two places for documenters whose function is to document the entire laboratory and its practices from a subjective and critical perspective and whose intention is to give back to society a way of documenting the ephemeral and the practices of knowledge transmission.

Designed as a Temporary Autonomous Zone, according to Hakim Bey’s ideas, LINHA DE FUGA will have moments of collective work where participants can compare and work on their artistic projects in relation to other practices; and individual work periods, where each participant defines the most appropriate way to occupy time available: in collaboration with other participants, in individual feedback with invited artists or in the development of their individual research.
In the next edition we want to rethink the concept of democracy, considering the current political trends in the world. A democratic society is a society that must consider difference and that does not regulate social life by a defined majority, as such; it must respect the anonymous, the excluded and the unnamed minority. However, and as defended by the Portuguese philosopher José Gil, “fear prevents certain forces from expressing themselves, inhibits, removes and separates the individual from their territory, retracts the space of the body, shatters group cohesions – all with mediate and immediate effects in the processes of economic, social, artistic and thought production.” In the territories 'classified' as peripheral, this situation is more evident when the construction of the image of the self is extremely important for the individual and, therefore, where the social pressure of fitting into a hegemonic majority makes us forget the importance of thinking about the common space, which belongs to everyone. Thus, we propose to think about the importance of anonymity, giving up the ego, the centralism, the protagonism. Our proposal is to think about the importance of public space for the construction of the pro-common: the space of democracy. What do we do as citizens to reduce the inequalities of a democracy? Can art do anything? Our challenge is to answer these questions throughout the laboratory.

Parallel to the Laboratory, a programme of shows, installations and performances is proposed, created by the invited artists and which the participants can attend for free and to which they can add the presentations of their work in progress.